Cyberpunk

They don't though, not at the top top. The goal for some is to remove capitalism after the chaff has been thoroughly separated from the wheat.

They suffer the working class and petit bourgeois because they need people to make their things, contribute to their lives in some alienated way; but if they believe they can get those things without the lower classes' stink all over, then they'll eliminate the working class.

They no longer need assistants or secretaries thanks to LLMs allowing natural language interfaces to software. They keep getting sold on the idea of robot workers and maintenance robots to fix the robots and such. They think it's close to time to end it.

Part of the problem I think is that their whole way of thinking is to ignore any externalities (from the polution they produce but don't want to deal with to the growing economic disparity undercutting their profits) as someone else's problem. Most companies need employed consumers to exist but each one benefits individually if they fire all their own workers - as long as someone else pays enough workers so they can buy their products. The people in charge of each company are there because they're good at making the line go up consistently quarter by quarter, no matter what that takes. I don't think they have the capability to deal with big problems (like this, or climate change) any more than the inclination.

Basically nobody's steering the ship because they're all too busy disassembling it for parts.

Yeah but only you get rid of employees, the other companies still have them 🫠